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During the Department of State’s Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism on July 16, 2026 (see below), U.S. officials used stark, uncompromising language directed at left-wing political ideology and activism. Rubio characterised leftists as "enemies of civilisation" and an "encroaching darkness" driven by "poisonous resentment," while Miller asserted that left-wing activists are motivated by "envy, by hatred, by jealousy" and dismissed appeals to civil liberties as "completely pretextual and disingenuous" shields meant to evade criminal punishment. If you know about "othering" and trying to focus people's views on "them vs us" you will immediately see where this came from, why they are doing it, and where it can lead to. An old friend of mine recently pulled me up on comparing the US Government to Nazis, and I hear what he is saying, they are not Nazis as that was a group from the 1930s and 1940s. Ev...

Over the centuries curious humans, often individuals with a passion for one particular species, have watched, prodded, catalogued, and shared their insights of the natural world that envelops us. Back in the day their notes and publications were held in the dusty backrooms of specialised libraries but welcome to the Internet and the World Wide Web, it's now all available, and 64+ million pages freely available to everyone. The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL is transforming global research by providing free, worldwide access to knowledge about life on Earth. To document Earth’s species and understand the complexities of rapidly changing ecosystems in the midst of a major extinction crisis and accelerating climate change, researchers require access to the world’s collective knowledge about biodiversity — something that no single library can provide. While natural history books and...

Murphy Roberts reading with children as part of the school's 'lap reading' program, 1986 . courtesy of the Papunya Literature Production Centre Archive Papunya is world famous for a number of things, mainly for being the place that I live in, but also for it's "dot painting" that everyone thinks of when they hear, "Australian Aboriginal art - see my  Johnny Warangkula  post, and videos: Papunya - Story of Dot Painting (AI), and Celebrating 50 years of the Papunya art movement | ABC News . An exhibition at the National Library of Australia  (Canberra) though has come out of the blue though and it looks awesome and about a Papunya subject I had no idea - what a wonderful surprising place Papunya continues to be. Wangka Wakaṉutja: The Story of the Papunya Literature Production Centre Free exhibition is open until 31st January, 2027 Explore the decades-long, remarkable efforts of the Papunya community to record language and culture and keep it alive. Betw...

We've all heard and use VPNs to either 'hide' our traffic or, more commonly, to pretend we're in another country so we can watch that movie - well Tor is a bit like that, but way more so and built-in to the network it uses. As Wikipedia says,  Tor is: ... a free overlay network for enabling anonymous communication. It is built on free and open-source software run by over seven thousand volunteer-operated relays worldwide, as well as by millions of users who route their internet traffic via random paths through these relays. This technique is called onion routing . Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace a user's internet activity by preventing any single point on the internet (other than the user's device) from being able to view both where traffic originated from and where it is ultimately going to at the same time. This conceals a user's location and usage from anyone performing network surveillance or traffic analysis from any such point, protecting ...

I love "cozy crime", especially when it's set in the UK. Give me an episode of any of the following and I am at peace with the world until the murderer is walking away in cuffs and the final words of wisdom or humour are uttered. Brokenwood Mysteries Midsomer Murders Grantchester Jonathan Creek Christie: Poirot / Miss Marple Inspector Morse / Lewis Rosemary & Thyme Vera Pie in the Sky Lovejoy Queens of Mystery The Bletchley Circle Ludwig Death in Paradise Foyle's War McDonald & Dodds Whitstable Pearl Rumpole Of The Bailey Hinterland (more dark than cozy) Death Valley Holmes / Sherlock Holmes There's many more that I'm sure I've missed but that's enough for you to get the idea eh. Almost all are based upon books, and absolutely books are the best, apart from when the TV shows nail what I had in my mind.  Five Great Mysteries Set in Australia and New Zealand by Karina Kilmore, May 20, 2026 ... the fast-growing New Zealand crime writing scene is ...

Not sure with my secure and private BNZ bank app and 2FAS password manager needs to know all these things about me, apart from they are interested and wanna track stuff. BNZ Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are to be expected, but ByteDance, owners of TikTok, inside my banking app - what's the deal Bank of New Zealand? 2FAS Pass

Starting on a Monday with the easy puzzle you work your way through the week as they get harder and harder. I find Clues by Sam a lovely wee break at work, each puzzle takes no longer than 15 minutes, often a lot quicker. How to play Clues by Sam Your goal is to figure out who is criminal and who is innocent . Based on what you know, tap on a suspect to choose if they are innocent or criminal. They might reveal a new clue. You cannot guess! Just like in real life, you can't convict someone based on a 50/50 hunch. There is always a logical next choice, even when you think there isn't! If you're prevented from making something you believe is a logical choice, you missed something. The puzzles are verified by foolproof algorithms, the puzzles are always 100% correct.

Anyone that spots a lump of bureaucratic bullshit AND ties that to a common human desire is great in my books :) The second story just tickles my Carry On 'poos and farts are funny' mind - it's not big, it's not clever, but HA HA HA HA. The Bureau of Minor Sufferings (BMS) is a satirical AI-powered certificate generator that creates hyper-formal US government-style complaint documents for everyday petty grievances. Users describe a minor complaint — a stolen lunch, a Netflix betrayal, being left on read — and receive a personalized bureaucratic certificate complete with an official case number, two findings of fact, a severity grade on the Bureau’s DEFCON scale, a forensic emotional-impact calculation, a fabricated legal precedent, and a formal ruling. The service is free to use with no account required. Both findings and the Official Ruling are included free; an optional Official Filing ($4.99, one-time) adds a clean, watermark-free HD download. The Bureau is a parody...

Who doesn't want their tech platforms to be open, sovereign, and built to last? A question aimed at everyone in AoNZ but especially and directly to the NZ Government / government. It's well known that the NZ government is an almost totally closed ' Microsoft shop ' with Microsoft's wide ranging contracts for all agencies, use of the ( flaky ) Microsoft stack from offshore* AI / SAAS to the desktop operating systems and apps. It's Microsoft all the way down baby. Fantastic if you're Microsoft (based in Washington, United States) or a New Zealand Microsoft employee. Shit if you have any sense of being open, sovereign, built to last, which every Kiwi assumes the government is being. Catalyst , a Wellington (NZ) headquartered tech company and proudly NZ owned has fought the good fight for so long they must be bruised from all their banging of heads against the brickwall.  We're Catalyst, the technology partner backing some of New Zealand's most ...

I spent a happy few evenings last month going through all my passwords in my password manager and, for any accounts that I never use, I visited the website to delete the account. It turns out there are 4 types out of methods to delete: Big button on the website, push the delete, and it's done Fill in a form, wait for a response Send an email to an 'admin', wait for a response Call a phone number Steps 1 - 3 were fine, and around 90% of my requests were, eventually, actioned. Making me do a phone call is SHITE and I now hate the company. Here's 4 articles all about data, and the last link talks about what really happens when you 'delete' something. The danger when a metric becomes a target by Kat Greenbrook, August 2, 2026 There are many things that organisations care about that are hard to measure directly. Instead, they measure something else that correlates with what they care about. Test scores are measured to represent student learning. Emergency department ...

Wholly fark a molly, "30-40,000 images in a 24 hour period" is a shit tonne of photos The Guardian receives from it's photo journalists and others around the world. 30-40,000 images in a 24 hour period and during an event like the World Cup this can double. I can't imagine the systems they have to sieve this amount and to choose the ones they want to use, astounding eh. The Guardian’s global head of photography, Fiona Shields , also discusses : How to pursue quality in an age of phone cameras What's your advice for young photographers? Is there still a place for film in covering breaking news? Is it over for black and white photography? Is it possible to convey when a public figure's image has changed? Why always use mugshots for convicted people? Politician snaps: interesting vs unflattering? How do you ensure images are real? How do you use child images responsibly? What are your iconic political photos?

Are You In The Weights ( https://intheweights.com/ ) by Thomas Dimson and Joey Flynn. Find out if you live on in GPT-5.5, GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-5.6 Terra, GPT-5.6 Luna, GPT-5.4 Mini, Opus 4.8, Haiku 4.5, Grok 4.20, Gemini 3.1 Lite, Kimi K2 0905, DeepSeek V4, Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 3.2 1B, GLM 4.7 Flash, Mistral 3.2 24B, and Qwen3 8B. Apparently, yes I am, yes I do -  https://intheweights.com/p/mike-riversdale  - but as an Australian cricketer, I don't think so on so many levels.   The "hallucinations" about me are closer, some times, not the rugby league fella but absolutely a world class and celebrity British actor.         WHAT ARE THE WEIGHTS? Large language models encode their knowledge and reasoning through billions of numbers called "the weights." The amazing capabilities of AI come through adjusting those weights to better represent world knowledge and tasks. "In the weights" means that a model is able to recall someone without using tools like web se...

It's that time of the year in Aotearoa New Zealand when family members are split, friends lose friends, and all over the motu people can't believe other people didn't vote for the LITTLE PENGUIN / KORORĀ  in the Bird Of The Year. What can I say, vote Kororā because they are the cutest of birds and Wellingtonians just like me. It’s the world’s smallest penguin with a big place in New Zealanders’ hearts. Marching out to sea each morning, returning at dusk after a hard day’s fishing – this penguin is a true blue worker. Forest & Bird is helping to boost the population living around Wellington's coastline. Ōamaru Penguins We’re the passionate flock behind Ōamaru Penguins, proudly championing New Zealand’s cutest little campaigners, the kororā little penguin! Our team spends its days wearing many hats (and occasionally dodging penguin attitude), caring for the colony, supporting conservation and research, and creating unforgettable visitor experie...